


thaw

by nanasalt



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Anya has her own life and does what she wants with it, F/M, Fluff, The Coat - Freeform, and sometimes what she wants is quiet company and warmth and maybe a nap, and soon it will be spring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:53:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29477253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanasalt/pseuds/nanasalt
Summary: “Information traded for safety is suspect anyway,” he adds, with a smile, and nudges the teapot nearer to her.Anya nods thoughtfully and pours them both fresh cups.
Relationships: Anya | Anastasia Romanov/Gleb Vaganov
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	thaw

**Author's Note:**

> _anonymous asked: For the prompt thing!! “You need sleep.”_
> 
> Originally posted to Tumblr.

The first time Anya comes to Gleb’s office, it’s because she’s dragged in, her arm caught in the rough hand of a soldier. Much as Gleb might wish otherwise, what happens is an interrogation; it’s not gentle. He tries to be kind, but the street sweeper surprises him with her tense answers and ability to dance around his questions without ever satisfactorily answering them. Anya holds her own against him and he can’t help but admire it, even while the discontent sits under his ribs. She accepts the offer of friendship for what it is, with the easy grace of a queen accepting a petitioner, though she doesn’t answer if she will accept the friendship itself.

He lets her go, and shocks himself with it.

The second time Anya comes to his office she is running, because she is being followed. She makes it as far as the entryway before another officer stops her and this time Anya isn’t dragged but lead in. The officer says the young woman was clearly lying but said she had information for Comrade Vaganov, and Gleb smiles politely around the twisting of his stomach.

"She might," he allows, and adds that Anya is to be allowed access to his office - to him - as necessary.

Anya shakes her head once the officer leaves, says, “I was being followed on the streets”, and does not say “I needed help,” because she will never admit that. She turns down his offers to accompany her with an uneasy shift in her step and insists she would rather wait her pursuer out. Gleb shrugs off the unease and tries not to be distracted by the line of her profile as she hovers by the small window, her gaze sweeping the street more thoroughly than some of his officers. They wait in tense silence, his pen scratching over paper infrequently and Anya peeking out the curtains until she deems it safe to slip out again.

She doesn’t say thank you, this time, but she pauses and looks back to him. It’s enough.

The third time Anya visits his office, it is so cold she has swallowed her pride and came inside rather than freeze, or so she tells him. Gleb knows that the cold alone would not drive her into the arms of the Cheka, but her name is still mixed up in the Romanov case when it is spoken of. The association with an officer will give enough conflicting rumors to free her of the reputation she’s earned. Not cleanse her, entirely, but cast doubt on both sides. It’s clever, and Gleb realizes again how severely he underestimated her at first.

He can’t hate the thought of Anya using him, not if it helps her, but he does not say it in so many words.

Anya drinks the offered tea, this time, and paces until he offers her a chair with a good-natured smile. She smiles back, tiredly, and sits with a hand pressed to her temple in silence. It’s an odd sort of companionship, until she suddenly breaks it to say, “You must want information. It’s all I have to trade.”

Her words say one thing, but the fear behind her eyes says that she knows there is far worse he could ask of her for protection. He might make demands, might ask her to barter more than her quiet company for the use of his good name. Gleb sets his report aside and wonders where she picked up such ideas, where she learned to be afraid and suspicious of _everyone_. He knows that life is a different sort of difficult for beautiful women in hard times, but –

He reassures her that all he wants is conversation, and perhaps to know she’s alright. Nothing more, and certainly nothing worse. “Information traded for safety is suspect anyway,” he adds, with a smile, and nudges the teapot nearer to her.

Anya nods thoughtfully and pours them both fresh cups.

Gleb starts to lose track of the times, after that. Anya appears in his office when the weather turns too cold, or Leningrad turns unfriendly, or - he thinks, though he cannot prove - when he has been in the streets too much, pacing the length of the city and all but snarling his frustration. Perhaps it’s vanity to assume she notices and thinks of him, but he’s not completely without sin; he can hope that she does.

Anya grows used to the space, to the tiny office with its filing cabinets and terrible heater. She learns where he keeps the cheap tea leaves and - occasionally - where to get hot water, if he is distracted and she doesn’t want to bother him. She knows where he tucks the novels he should not by right have, but he has justified them as practice for his French. Anya reads through them with a quicker eye than Gleb does, helps him on vocabulary a Russian street sweeper should not know, and yet he cannot think to suspect her, when her blue eyes are sparkling with amusement at his last mispronunciation, and he smiles back. If she is using him for his name and office, at least he is learning in return, though he has learned far more about her French accent and quick smiles than he has learned in new French words.

He cannot regret the trade, not when Anya comes back in the cold weather and lets herself in to join him, shaking ice from her gloves.

He turns to the sense of someone at the window, one day, when her presence has become no more unsettling than the cat that sometimes visits his apartment, and the words ‘we have to go’ die on the tip of his tongue. Gleb knows that Anya cannot be in the office without him; that much has been impressed on him by his superiors. He cannot compromise their security with the woman they assume is an informant, especially when the truth is more damning.

So he turns to say ‘I have to go’, and perhaps to offer to walk to her home - she never says yes, but he offers - and finds that Anya has fallen asleep in the chair she has dragged up against the filing cabinets. Her head rests against the window frame, just far enough from the glass that the cold can’t do more than kiss her cheek and draw a blush from her. She frowns a little in her sleep, her nose scrunched up, and her arms are crossed over her chest to keep what warmth her coat can firmly against her. Gleb wonders if he should keep a blanket in his office, wonders a beat later if he would do that without her influence. Wonders if it matters.

He picks up his overcoat, heavy and warm and more than big enough, and tucks it over her sleeping form. Anya stirs, blushing harder for the sudden warmth, and they are close enough that Gleb can count the faint freckles that spill across her nose, can see the way her eyelids flutter while she tries to figure out where she is. Somehow, she’s not afraid; despite all the reasons she might be afraid to wake in a strange place, she is not afraid of him.

Gleb feels his breath stop in his chest when she stirs against the weight of the coat.

“I can go,” Anya offers, and her voice is muddled by sleep, is out-of-sorts and troubled, and she had been so peaceful in sleep, so counter to the harried worker he knows in their waking moments. Gleb should send her on her way, should let her leave and put this from his mind, should forget about Anya’s unguarded moments. 

“You need sleep,” he says instead, and smiles. She smiles back, faintly, and curls into his coat, a wordless noise of exhaustion escaping her. She works too hard - works herself to the bone every day - and now she is comfortable and warm and the emotion that flashes through Gleb is indescribable. The urge to tuck his coat more firmly around her is beaten down only by his sense of propriety.

Still, he decides to put off the unpleasant visits the Cheka must make a little longer, to waste a little more time editing reports. If Anya can steal a few moments of sleep, warm and safe and away from the dangers that plague Leningrad’s streets, then it is worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, follow my writing, edits, and other content at [vampyrekatwrites](http://vampyrekatwrites.tumblr.com/). Follow [nanasalt](http://nanasalt.tumblr.com/) for my _Anastasia_ -specific things. Feel free to PM me or send asks or prompts! I am notoriously bad at replying to comments here, but I love interaction. It's what keeps me writing.


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